Sam Sheridan
After high school Sam went into the Merchant Marines, then quit and spent some time traveling Europe. He went to Harvard, also working a summer on the largest cattle ranch in Montana. Immediately after graduating, Sam took a job on a private sailing yacht for 18 months all the way to Australia. From there Sam went to Thailand, where he lived in a Muay Thai camp and fought, featuring on National Geographic’s “A Fighting Chance.”
Later Sam got a job doing construction in Antarctica, where he met a smokejumper who got him into Wildland Firefighting.
He continues to do yacht deliveries and has been writing books for the last few years. His first book, “A Fighter’s Heart,” took him on a lengthy odyssey to Brazil and Japan. Sam's second book, “The Fighter’s Mind,” is an investigation into the mental game of fighting, with essays and interviews with the best fighters and trainers in the world.
“Push on when you think you can't, and next time that moment will come later”
“So yes, get prepared, but don't "be first"—don't start talking about *us* and *them* already, because then you're making *them* into the *other*, and that's when the shooting starts. Far too many of the survival books I've read go there, way too early. You're becoming part of the problem; you're not the hero, you're the bad guy. It's all *us*.”
“if zombies eat a family member, you're gonna dissociate”
“If you had a yard as a child, you probably remember it with a startling intimacy. You knew that yard: every inch, every bush, each step on the tree you could climb, the whorls and knots in the branches, the bare dirt spots, the sandy gravel, the soft grass. It was deep, profound, intimate local knowledge. You intuitively knew what was happening around you at all times. Primitive man would have felt that way about a much larger stretch of ground, but it was still "his" territory. This very ability is really what allowed Homo sapiens to expand and succeed the way he did.”
“Fighting is a way to force something to happen.”